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SAM SIG: The eBay Architecture

Description

The Monthly Meeting of the Software Architecture and Modeling SIG

Presentation Overview

The eBay Architecture – Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance and cost

System designers constantly struggle with how to build a feature that fulfills product requirements, while keeping the system fluid and maintainable. As product requirements get more and more complicated, tighter integration with existing data and product features becomes increasingly important to keep the negative impact to the user experience at a minimum. If the page or program loads more slowly, while giving the user the rich experience - have we succeeded or failed?

In this session, eBay’s Dan Pritchett and Randy Shoup will delve into the strategies and driving principles that guide eBay's development teams across the world. They will talk about real world examples of how these principles will allow you to design what, until now, has been thought to be impossible - scalable, high performance and agile systems that do not get in the way of the organization’s feature velocity. The guiding principles, methodology, and patterns are what have allowed eBay to scale a large development organization across four continents.

ATTENDEES WILL LEARN:
This session will cover the key enabling design patterns, methodologies, and best practices that allow us to maximize these factors and produce a highly scalable eCommerce platform that is used by millions of people each day. The following questions will be answered:

What is eBay’s architecture today?

What made eBay make the decision to go with Java?

What key lessons has eBay learned from scaling Java?

Where do we see eBay’s architecture going in the future?

About the Presenters

Randy Shoup

Randy Shoup is a Distinguished Architect in eBay's Corporate Architecture group, which provides technology and services across all the eBay companies -- eBay Marketplace, PayPal, Skype, Shopping.com, etc. For 1 1/2 years, he was the architect for eBay's search infrastructure. Prior to eBay, Randy was Chief Architect at Tumbleweed Communications, and has also held a variety of software development and architecture roles at Oracle and Informatica. He received a BS in Mathematical and Computational Science, and an AB in Political Science, from Stanford University. He has been programming in Java since 1997.

Dan Pritchett

Dan Pritchett is a Technical Fellow at eBay where he has been a member of the architecture team for the past four years. In this role, Dan interfaces with the strategy, business, product and technology teams across eBay Marketplaces, PayPal and Skype. Dan has been at eBay since 2001 and has made significant contributions to various business critical initiatives at eBay, including the migration of attributes and catalogs to the V3 marketplace platform, the implementation of eBay’s Global Billing System, and the introduction of reliable asynchronous processing to the eBay platform. With over 20 years of experience at technology companies such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and Silicon Graphics, Dan has an extensive depth of technical experience, ranging from network-level protocols and operating systems to systems design and software patterns.

Dan has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Missouri, Rolla. He lives in San Jose with his wife and two daughters. He likes to spend his free time coaching at Willow Glen Little League and tinkering with cantankerous old British cars.